The leaves on the trees outside the prison that once contained the celestial demon king have grown tired long ago and the trees bent inward, falling. Life in this place has collapsed under the weight of a small hole in the fabric of space, leaking into it, a broken construction incapable of lasting against one who does not tire. Though the so-called immortals who constructed the master’s prison are all long-since perished, their work has endured. It was a creation they called perfect, a prison so complete they dared not imagine the death of a star capable of damaging even the outermost shell…

  And yet they themselves dared not imagine death. Such trifling beings who would dare call themselves immortal could never hope to contain one whose path is the essence of being and non-being; the one above death, the one destined before conception to conquer the stars.

  Jiang Guo is naked, and yet free. The prison is shattered, exploding into the nighttime stars with green light and brightening the entire hemisphere of his world to something resembling day, something distorted with his color as if to announce to all creation that the celestial immortal has returned.

  Jiang laughed deeply and his voice boomed.

  “Hear me, creation!”

  There was no creation around to hear.

  “I have returned!”

  The wind blew against the walls of his cracked gray prison, a set of walls constructed around a pinprick of light in the centuries that have long-since passed, a reconstruction of something built eons ago, itself a reconstruction of a reconstruction of a slab of metal and stone that once marked a so-called tomb. Jiang flexed his hands and continued laughing.

  “There is no prison you could ever hope to construct to contain one such as myself!”

  “There is no wall you could ever build of any material in all creation that could ever block me from my path!”

  “I will live forever and I will conquer the stars! This is my aim! This is my power, and I will achieve it!”

  He jumped, hands flying above his head like a jumping-jack, fists closed,

  …and fell back down to the ground again. His hands fell to his sides, then moved to the front of his hips, opening and closing again.

  Again, Jiang placed his hands in fists above his head and jumped.

  Nothing. His feet touched the ground again.

  “Fuck!” he cursed, quickly stealing glances to all sides, checking that no one heard his outburst or saw his embarrassing defeat at the hands of gravity.

  His feet plopped near-silently to the ground. Jiang sat down, legs criss-crossed, and began to muse, considering his present situation. To all sides were cracked gray stone walls, and though the ceiling appeared to be just as old was much worse for wear. It was caving in in three places, and an entire corner was gone, the rubble collapsing down into gravel at the bottom corner of the rightmost wall from Jiang.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  By the look of the stars it would seem a million years or so had passed.

  A million years.

  One million years.

  He pondered the meaning of existence and of eternity. This is the path he had chosen, this life, this eternity. It was certain that everyone… or, no, most everyone he knew was dead. There were certain exceptions, to be sure, but everyone he had ever strove against, everyone he had ever placed underfoot, everyone that had ever served him or knew of him or died in his service or antagonism, were all dead. It was likely there was no history left of him at all, not even the remnants of epics he could never begin to verify had ever been created at all.

  The damned fools that betrayed him were dead also. He would never be able to pay them back for their treachery. In that moment of final defeat he had promised a thousand generations of their descendants an existence occupied entirely by molten lead, their eyes removed, their tongues cut out, all replaced by fire and brimstone.

  Jiang laughed softly. It had been an idle threat but he would never forget that look of terror in the fools’ eyes when they finally finished the imprisonment. He did really mean it at the time, and perhaps they could sense that, but he knew equally that his temper would cool eventually. Indeed it had, though perhaps if he had been released while any of the thousand generations of accursed descendants were still alive the story may have gone somewhat differently. But now? He was certain they were all dead. Indeed it was possible that ten-thousand generations of descendants were dead. Ultimately the exact number depended on the lifespan of the dead immortals’ progeny.

  He did not know how long an immortal could be expected to live in this present generation. It was impossible to know. Speculatively, he would guess the children’s children lived no longer than an average mortal. However great the height a parent might rise to, the pursuit of power often leads them to abandon their children to wolves and old masters in search of a quick ticket to advancement. It was easy to prey upon the abandoned children of an immortal, and though everyone knew the immortals did not care for their children, allowing one to die was still seen as a grievous blow to one’s honor. Possessing the child of a powerful cultivator, then, was an easy ticket to protection and thus to more passive means of advancement. If one no longer had to defend one’s self one could enter into a trance state and advance far more quickly than while actively stuck at the upper limit of a realm. It helped that time often procured elixirs that would induce this effect and provide the necessary spiritual power for a breakthrough.

  The trick became to find some young master and imprint them on the elder as strongly as possible before entering the trance, inducing them to defend you in sleep. In exchange for this protection, the elder would advance the young master through multiple realms in quick succession, providing elixirs and spiritual guidance along the way in order to greatly enhance the young one’s rate of development, ultimately holding back one or more stages for after the elder’s reawakening. Sometimes the young master’s expedited rate of advancement could lead to an unstable foundation, but it was always easy to talk a fool into danger, as of course they were the Dao’s gift to cultivation rather than one of the countless dead that had claimed the same prodigiousness over the long centuries.

  The young masters were always so blind, advancing as worms upon blades of grass and deigning to claim understanding of the hawk’s view. And yet though it was always the elders claiming to be the hawk in this analogy, they never did understand just how vast the world truly was. The hawks may as well be worms in comparison to the wider universe. They were staring at a blade of grass growing at the foot of Mt. Tai, unable even to realize it as but the smallest mountain of an infinite range stretching off into the distance, unable even to separate the blade from the mountains beyond it.

  Jiang smiled devilishly. Though he knew that it would be easy to tell he was no young master and nothing even resembling a foundation-building cultivator, there would be no one alive that could recognize him, and none in this world who could tell what stage he was truly at. From the moment Jiang reacquired the foundation-building level of development, he would quickly speed through the following realms as a prodigy among prodigies and quickly find a senior master to take him in. From there it would be extremely easy to surpass the decrepit fool and reacquire the power he had so clearly lost.

  “Hello?” a mid-pitched male voice shouted from outside.